Hollywood studios and movie theaters spent much of the spring and summer engaged in a strange chess match, trying to find the right time to launch two aspiring blockbusters, 'Tenet' and 'Mulan,' which might jumpstart movie-going amid a pandemic.
Yet while both movies contain plenty of fights, with the benefit of hindsight neither of them gave the theater chains a fighting chance.
Disney, for its part, ultimately opted for a domestic streaming debut of"Mulan" at a premium surcharge via Disney+, coupled with an international release. Yet the movie flopped in China, where the local population exhibited a demonstrable preference for home-grown movies, including one that also dealt with a period story about the Chinese battling a foreign invader, the 1930s epic"The Eight Hundred.
Studios might spend millions promoting their product, but they generally have a reasonable idea when it turns out poorly. The on-demand strategy betrayed a sense of that, as executives sought to maintain some flow of money coming in, without sacrificing a major payoff down the road. "Mulan" possessed the name recognition associated with the animated version, but unlike recent hits such as"The Lion King" and"Aladdin," significantly departed from it, in the same way the financially disappointing"Dumbo" did. Losing the songs turned it into an action film, a spectacle that surely blunted its appeal among the younger kids that parents would have taken to see it.